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Museum of Arts and Design New York (ed.) JEWELRY STORIES Highlights from the Collection 1947–2019 ISBN 978-3-89790-602-0 Susan Cummins / Damian Skinner / Cindi Strauss IN FLUX American Jewelry and the Counterculture ISBN 978-3-89790-597-9 Danner Stiftung / Die Neue Sammlung — The Design Museum (eds.) JEWELRY ISBN 978-3-89790-585-6 Beatriz Chadour-Sampson RINGS OF THE 20TH AND 21ST CENTURIES The Alice and Louis Koch Collection ISBN 978-3-89790-516-0 Wilhelm Lindemann

Eleanor Moty is a seminal figure in the field of contemporary international studio jewelry. In a career that has spanned more than fifty years, she has been both a dedicated practitioner and a devoted teacher who has inspired succeeding generations of artists, collectors, and fellow professionals. She began to attract national attention in the late 1960s and early 1970s for her experiments with photo etching and electroforming metal. Later, mid-career, Moty made what seems like an abrupt shift in style and focus, with more abstract works whose designs were inspired by the natural inclusions within the non-precious stones used in their fabrication. While her works have been published in prominent books, catalogues, and journals internationally, this monograph is the first comprehensive in-depth examination of her career from its inception in 1966 through the present day.

BERND MUNSTEINER Reflexions in Stone ISBN 978-3-89790-203-9 Wilhelm Lindemann

Authors: Bruce Pepich, Matthew Drutt, Helen W. Drutt English Editor: Matthew Drutt

MUNSTEINER — THE YOUNG GENERATION Tom + Jutta Munsteiner ISBN 978-3-89790-374-6

www.arnoldsche.com

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arnoldsche

ISBN 978-3-89790-608-2

QUIET ELEGANCE THE JEWELRY OF ELEANOR MOTY

Selected books on contemporary jewelry by

QUIET ELEGANCE

THE JEWELRY OF ELEANOR MOTY

arnoldsche

Trained as an artist/metalsmith, Eleanor Moty received her BFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her MFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia. Her pioneering work in the late 1960s and the 1970s in photofabrication (photoetching precious and non-precious metal) resulted in articles and workshops in which she introduced the processes to the field of jewelry and metalsmithing. Early work included small hollowware forms as well as jewelry. In the late 1970s, Moty returned to traditional metal techniques and focused on brooches. Selecting one-of-a-kind stones with unusual characteristics or striking inclusions, Moty creates sculptural brooches which evoke images of landscape and architecture. She writes, “Landscape continues to have a subtle influence on my work. This stems from my childhood on a farm in Illinois, where the horizon line was always visible and the texture and color of the land constantly changed with the plantings and seasons. References to architecture also come into play with subtle changes of planes and spatial illusion. Each piece evolves from the energy and intrinsic beauty of the stone and intuition.” Eleanor Moty lives in Tucson, Arizona, and is Professor Emerita of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she taught jewelry and metalsmithing from 1972 to 2001. For more than five decades, her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries nationally and internationally. She is the recipient of the Master of the Medium award from the James Renwick Alliance, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, is a Fellow of the American Craft Council, and was designated Master Metalsmith in 2012 by the Metal Museum, Memphis, Tennessee, and honored with a retrospective exhibition there. In 2020 she was the recipient of the Society of North American Goldsmiths’ Lifetime Achievement Award. Her work can be found in permanent museum collections in the US and abroad.

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ELEANOR MOTY JEWELRY

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QUIET ELEGANCE

THE JEWELRY OF ELEANOR MOTY Bruce W. Pepich

Eleanor Moty is internationally recognized for her groundbreaking work in the field of art jewelry. In a career that has spanned more than fifty years, she has been a major proponent of altering the way the public thinks of jewelry and personal adornment both as aesthetic objects and as vehicles for self-expression on the part of the artists and the people who wear their work. She began to attract national attention in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as an undergraduate- and graduate-level student, for her experimentations with photoetching and electroforming metal. Later, in mid-career, Moty moved away from creating organic, technically driven pieces to fabricating breathtakingly beautiful brooches that focus on formal design concepts that explore ways to make gemstones and metal equal partners in adornment. An American original, Moty grew up in the countryside on the western edge of the Chicago suburbs. In the 1950s and 1960s, the city’s sprawl dropped off at the farmland from which numerous suburbs were slowly emerging. However, the pace of this development meant one could still live a rural life relatively close to the city’s center. Growing up as the child of immigrants provided her with a slightly different background from the suburbanites she met in high school. Life on a working farm instilled a strong sense of personal responsibility in Moty and also made her comfortable with the variety of tools needed and the kinds of problem-solving called for in a small agricultural enterprise. Her parents lived the twentieth-century version of the life of nineteenth-century settlers who came to the Midwest and became farmers.1 Moty became a pioneer in her own right, helping lead the way in creating handmade jewelry that is recognized as a legitimate contemporary art form. Familiarity with tools and being self-reliant served Moty well in her undergraduate studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and during her work on her Master of Fine Arts degree at Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University in Philadelphia. As she became interested in making jewelry, she also began to think about how to inject narrative content into pieces through the addition of photographic images and to make more unconventional organic forms and intriguing raised surfaces by electroforming metal. With photoetching, a piece of metal is coated with a photosensitive resist. The photograph is prepared as a high-contrast transparency—black and white with no gray tones—and exposed to the metal via contact printing with a high-intensity light source. After treatment with a solvent, the representation remains on the surface as a pattern for plating or etching. Electroforming is a process in which a heavy layer of metal is built up, one atom at a time, creating form and surface dimension simultaneously, often resulting in an elaborately textured surface.2 These two areas of interest were so new in the field at that time that one could not readily study them in art departments. Moty had to conduct her own research, often in combination with fellow students in engineering and scientific departments, and alongside art faculty members.

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